


let those glory days begin

by friendly_ficus



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Post-Canon, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, canon compliant? probably not, i just want these two to be HAPPY
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:14:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25700401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendly_ficus/pseuds/friendly_ficus
Summary: They’re married twice: first in the middle of a circle of desecrated standing stones, then in the chapel of the Lacramor estate. And then, victorious, they live.(Primsy and Liam marry in haste, but repenting never comes into the picture.)
Relationships: Primsy Coldbottle/Liam Wilhelmina Jawbreaker
Comments: 8
Kudos: 59





	let those glory days begin

There’s a beat when the battle ends. The world feels like it’s on fire, smoke choking the air and the groans of soldiers dying, and he can’t feel a scrap of the righteousness that got him to this point. There’s a thundering of rubble somewhere above him, where the ramparts of the castle are still in the process of falling.

Beside him, laying in the shadow of Castle Candy, Ruby lets out a joyless laugh. He laughs, too, and there they are together at the end of everything. 

“You told me you want to get married,” Ruby says, when they’ve run out of breath. “To Primsy? You’re sure?”

“I’m sure I don’t wanna go home,” he grumbles, wincing as he rolls over. Beneath him, mangled nearly beyond recognition, is his crossbow. “And Primsy’s nice,” he continues, struggling to his feet and offering Ruby a hand.

She takes it, lets him pull her to her feet and sling an arm around her shoulders. If she asks, it’s to steady her. She asks a different question.

“Could you be happy?”

Liam blinks. “I think so.”

Nobody should tell her, but when Ruby gets this determined look on her face, she looks so much like Jet it’s like getting punched in the face. She nods, once, and flicks her fingers. A trace of arcane energy dances between them, and he’s too tired to ask about the spell.

_ Annabelle,  _ he hears her murmur, but the rest of the message evades him. 

“Let’s go,” his cousin says, and if he wants to keep his arm around her shoulders he has to keep up with her.

“What?” Liam thinks he probably sounds confused. He definitely  _ feels  _ confused, somewhere in the empty place where his anger should be.

“Let’s go get you married. You don’t want to go home—let’s solve it, right now.” She turns them down a familiar trail, and he lets himself follow.

They don’t talk about the castle getting smaller in the distance. They don’t talk about the fires in the town. When they reach the trees Liam takes a deep breath, looking for peppermint and pine, but even this far from the battlefield all he can smell is war.

The seed is a warm weight in the inside pocket of his armor, almost pulsing through the layer of his shirt. He can feel it against his chest.

Ruby stops them a few hundred feet from the clearing, tugs him behind a tree and starts plucking leaves and dirt out of his hair. She’s helped by a spectral hand that finds Primsy’s favor in his pocket, giving his face a perfunctory wipe with it. The spell looks different than it has before—gray instead of blue, with sword callouses. It tucks the favor back into his hand, gives his shoulder one firm squeeze.

He doesn’t think about the implications at all. Not at all. And Ruby doesn’t cry.

\---

“Marriage is an agreement,” Caramelinda says, when they’re heading to Dulcington. “I saw you, walking with Duchess Primsy. Could you enter into an agreement with her?”

It’s strange, to think that the last time they talked about marriage, everything was different. Liam feels different, an ember in his chest, burning through everything that even remotely resembles doubt. This is what it means, to be a war guy. 

(He is terrified of this fire going out. He has no idea who he’ll be without it.)

“Liam. Are you listening?” 

He nods.

“Marriage is an agreement before it’s anything else,” Caramelinda says, something sharp in it.

Liam, in a moment of good sense, doesn’t say anything about Amethar  _ or  _ Lazuli. Everybody’s always talking about Lazuli, lately, like she can give them something. Like they can devote themselves to her, to the past, and she’ll be able to give them anything back.

“I have to see my rangers,” he croaks, hoarse. “We have to be ready for the battle.”

She nods, steps back. There’s something fierce on her face, something burning in her eyes, but he’s too caught up in his own fury to try and understand hers.

When the fire in his chest goes out, sometime after hurling a curse at Deeproot and watching him die, he thinks about this conversation.

\---

There’s a brief waft of spearmint, cutting through the air, and his mother appears from the trees like a miracle. She pulls the two of them into an embrace, soft and strong as the sky.

Ruby shudders hard enough for Liam to feel it. 

“There, now,” Spearia says, low and gentle. “There.”

When the hug ends she keeps ahold of both their hands and lets them lead her to the standing stones. And in the shadow of one, behind her cousin, is Primsy.

The air is hazy with smoke, even out here. There’s blood splattered across Primsy’s dress, ash in Liam’s hair. He realizes that her favor is still in his hand; he brings it up, waves it like a little flag, and she smiles.

The stones are... it’s another place that meant something like peace, ravaged by the war, but while the outer facades have been broken away there remains a core of purple rock where each one stood. Too hard to be broken, maybe, or the crusaders just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. 

He can hear them humming, can feel it faintly under his feet. The spirits of the world are not lost; his mother smiles her warmest smile, joins his and Primsy’s hands and says the right words. And it feels. And it feels.

The seed pulses against his chest, where he used to imagine his rage sat, waiting.

Liam swipes at his eyes, blinking away the smoke of the battle, the last few battles. The hand that isn’t bound to Primsy’s is clumsy, shaking, that’s why it isn’t enough. He shuts his eyes entirely, tries to breathe.

There’s a soft touch to his face, cloth wiping away a streak of dried blood at his hairline. When he opens his eyes Primsy’s there, gentle as she cleans his face. His wife. Their joined hands mean she’s his wife, and he’s her husband. 

“It’s not—I’m not sad,” he hastens to reassure her. “I’m  _ not.”  _

“You are,” she tells him, continuing with what might be a torn part of her sleeve. It’s soft. “There’s been so much loss. So much suffering. But you are my husband and I am your wife, and together we will make something new.”

His mother has withdrawn, pulled Annabelle and Ruby into conversation at the other side of the circle, and Primsy guides his head to her shoulder and lets him cry.

\---

It takes them two weeks to reach the easternmost of the Dairy Islands. They make port to avoid a storm brewing over the Rind, where the currents are intemperate and changeable. Annabelle looks out at the docks, frowning, and ushers both of them into the cabin they’ve been sharing while she goes ashore. 

Primsy smooths a stitch, continuing the pink-and-red striped border on a handkerchief. They were her wedding gift to him, squares of good cotton, and they’ve spent nights at sea talking about patterns and motifs. That’s part of the gift; the conversation, the getting to know each other. 

He still carries her favor, stained as it is by blood and soot, and he won’t get rid of it. It matters that he’s her champion. It matters that she chose him as her champion. 

(It makes her happy, that he keeps it, and over the course of two weeks he starts to understand what makes her happy.)

“Are we staying here the whole time?” he asks, paging through one of her books. It’s an adventure about a troubadour from the Meat Lands getting mixed up in succession lines. It’s funny, and it’s fun to think of Primsy buying this book, and it’s fun when they talk about it together.

“On the ship? Annabelle would prefer it if we did.” Primsy pauses a moment, ties a knot. “What do you think?”

Liam frowns, thinks for long enough that the page in front of him goes blurry and soft. Primsy hums softly, a Candian song she’d picked up somewhere, as she continues her work.

“Part of the reason people followed my father,” Liam says at last, slowly, “was that they knew him. They saw him around enough that they trusted him.”

“They still follow him,” Primsy reminds him. “He has his lands, his subjects.”

“That’s not enough to make yourself a king, and people believed in him enough for it.”

Primsy sets her embroidery aside and Liam blinks the blurriness from his eyes. The ship rocks gently.

“I agree,” she says. “You have to be there, for people to follow you.”

“Annabelle... doesn’t want that to happen?” From what he’s seen, Annabelle is Primsy’s biggest advocate.

“Annabelle worries about me, sometimes too much. She would prefer a great deal—but Liam,  _ I  _ am the duchess.”

He closes the book, sets it on the table they’ve wedged into the narrow cabin.

“What’s that mean, though?”

Primsy hums, goes over to the wardrobe and gets a coat out. She looks at him, a little bit of mischief in her eyes. “It means that by the time Annabelle’s done with her checks, Lord Ambert will have sent a messenger to invite us to stay in his castle.”

“And we’re going?” Liam reaches for his own coat.

“We’re going. I’ve been a young ruler for too long, sheltered by my relations. People need to see me around, too.”

They end up staying for three days, while the storm passes, and Liam watches people watch Primsy. There’s something about her; she puts people at ease, makes herself easy to care about. By the time they depart, Lord Ambert’s little court adores her—and, by extension, him.

Primsy watches people watch Liam, watches the way he talks to the gardeners and the shepherds and Lord Ambert’s son ( _ why  _ he’s hidden his identity in his own court she doesn’t ask). He’s wrong, when he credits her with all of their goodwill. He’s easy to care for.

“Good first trip?” Annabelle asks, when they’re sailing away, and Primsy nods, remembering the way Liam held her hand through the dancing, all three nights.

“People need to see us.”

\---

Liam gets the first letter a week after his second wedding.

It’s not  _ technically  _ a second wedding. No one disputes the legitimacy of their marriage; Annabelle had challenged someone to a duel about it on their first day in Lacrimor, and since then, nobody dares.

(Primsy’d had several sharp words about fighting her own battles and meddlesome cousins and potential political fallout, and Liam had nodded until she’d run out of steam.

“Thank you,” she said, when she was done. “You always listen.”)

So it’s not  _ actually  _ a second wedding. Everybody’s been really clear about how much it isn’t a second wedding—mutters about  _ Catherine Ghee  _ are alive and well, even this far from Candia—it’s just. A celebration of their vows, in the chapel for the nobility to see.

“So it’s a second wedding, right?” he asks Primsy, and she nods and asks him what he knows about grain production. Turns out, it’s a lot more than he thought he did. Not enough to rival the libraries of agricultural study in Ceresia, but enough to give something to the conversation.

So they’re married again under a huge pane of stained glass, the Bulb shining down over the Islands, and Liam bites his tongue the entire time the priest talks. Primsy never lets go of his hand.

Now, the letter: it’s a note from one of his older brothers. One of his much older brothers, actually—there’s fifteen years between them, and Liam has  _ maybe  _ a hazy memory of him—who went away and got married when Liam was six. He’s settled very happily in the Meat Lands, and sends congratulations on Liam’s marriage, and isn’t it a shame they haven’t kept in touch.

His first instinct is to burn it. Nobody ever cared about him while he was home, no letters ever came for him, so why should he care about this, this  _ stranger  _ now.

He feels it like the ghost of a spark in his chest, anger, and it makes him drop the letter on the desk and flee. He’s tired of anger, hates it—he goes to a corner of the expansive gardens and sits under a tree that has a view of the spot where he planted the seed, goes over preliminary crop reports until the sun starts going down.

A week after that, weighing the pros and cons, he sends a short reply. 

“You don’t have to,” Primsy says, when she finds him with the quill in hand. “You don’t have to write to anyone, if you don’t want to.”

“I think I want to,” he groans into his arms. “I really think I do.”

“If they trouble you—”

“Then I’ll stop.”

He can hear her raise an eyebrow. 

“I promise,” he says, lifting his head. “I just... I think I want to do this.”

She nods, slips a book under his pile of papers. A comedy of errors, one she hopes will make him laugh.

(In the days that come, it does.)

\---

It’s not that everything comes easy. Everything  _ definitely  _ doesn’t come easy. Liam stumbles in conversations, still, and there are innumerable little things that grate on him. Primsy has to make excuses for why he doesn’t attend church, has to cover for the fact that he was on trial for witchcraft less than a year ago, and he hates that she has to do extra work over him. And letters come, more of them now, from his brothers who grew up and went away and got married. It’s complicated, for all that it gives him trivia on the Meat Lands or Fructera to pepper into conversation. 

But after a while, there are more good days than bad.

The solar has long windows that span nearly from floor to ceiling, flooding the room with light during the day. It’s Liam’s favorite room to work in, the huge table with the map serving as a planning space for a hundred small reforms they’re working on. Primsy’s had years to come up with ideas, it turns out, and now she’s got enough support behind her to act on them. Now  _ he’s  _ support behind her, which is weird to think about. 

She has him and she has all the resources of House Bleu, and three months after their second wedding she has Annabelle, too.

“She needs people to trust,” Annabelle says on an evening early into her visit. Primsy’s back in her private study, writing to Ambert and the rest of the eastern nobility to convince them of the value of a more permanent trade relationship with whatever will be done with Port Syrup. Liam and Annabelle are on the terrace that overlooks the gardens, a card game going neglected between them.

“Can’t she trust you?”

“Yes.” He winces at the ice in her voice, but she continues. “But there are... there will always be people who wonder how different it would be if I were in power. People who put my word above hers.”

“That sucks,” he offers, to her nod, and when she keeps talking he realizes he’s being brought into Annabelle Cheddar’s confidence.

“It means I can’t be here all the time. I have to be—look, I love my ship. But that’s not why I only visit a few times a season.”

She’s quiet, after that, and he leaves her alone with her thoughts. He goes instead to Primsy’s study and sits in the quiet with her, listens to the scratching of her quill.

“Annabelle told me why she stays away,” he says, after a long time. “I’m sorry.”

Primsy takes a deep breath. “I have to stand on my own.”

“You miss her.”

“I do,” she says, something trembling in her voice. Liam pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and passes it to her, and she catches his hand.

They sit for a long time in the study that night.

\---

They walk through the gardens, he and Primsy, every evening they can manage. He thinks of her at Saccharina’s coronation, sometimes, and the careful way she’d spoken to him. This is... more than that was. Now they talk about plays and plants and politics, sometimes, or about the places they grew up. It feels right, her arm linked in his. 

It feels like the opposite of war.

\---

Ruby comes for a visit at the turning of the year. Not an official visit, with the formality and the circumstances they would need to make that happen. Ruby... to be honest, Liam’s sitting under his favorite tree and Ruby steps out of the shadows behind it, dark circles under her eyes. 

Liam and Primsy don’t talk about their parents. It’s not a hard and fast rule; Liam writes his mom a letter every few months, more than he did when he was a ward, but most days he doesn’t want to touch the subject of childhood with a ten-foot pole. Primsy’s passed away years ago, and she doesn’t mention them very often. But they  _ could  _ talk about it with each other, he realizes when he’s confronted with Ruby, because he couldn’t have those conversations with Ruby, not even if he wanted to.

Ruby doesn’t bring up her mother or her father. They don’t talk about the end of the war—not that they call it a war in the Dairy Islands, not when words like  _ conflict  _ and  _ tragedy  _ exist—and they don’t talk about the beginning of it either. Ruby’s... there’s something hollow in her. There are parts of their lives that don't feel safe to touch.

The third day in her impromptu stay, Liam finds her at the training grounds with the Puckering Bow in her hands.

“I miss Jet,” she confesses without turning around. “I miss her so much I don’t know what to do with it all.”

An arrow thuds into the target, shimmering green. If anyone asks, they’ll call it a trick of the light. (Any acceptance of magic is, it’s, it’s the work of lifetimes. It’s not part of any of the reforms Primsy’s openly pushing for. It’s careful, quiet conversations, coded letters and symbolic gifts.)

“Does anybody know you’re here?” he asks, as she lets another arrow fly.

“Probably not. I didn’t exactly say where I was going, and they don’t—they don’t want to know where I’m going. What I’m doing. They don’t want to know anything about  _ me.” _

“That sucks,” Liam says, as another arrow appears in her hands.

“It really does,” she laughs, that same joyless sound. He thinks he can hear sorrow, at the edges of it. “It really does.”

The last arrow splits her first, a perfect bullseye.

\---

Annabelle arrives a week after Ruby does, on the heels of a winter storm. She gives her one look before dragging her out of the corner of the solar that’s become Ruby’s corner.

Liam exchanges a relieved look with Primsy, even as they hurry to follow. He doesn’t want to watch Ruby stare out the window, caught up in memories. It’s not that his cousin neglects herself—she eats mechanically, practices archery daily—but there’s something keeping her far away from them, even in the same room.

Annabelle hauls her down to the training grounds and they fight, blade to blade, Ruby a wave of grief and Annabelle a stone for her to break herself against. After they scrape themselves off the ground, they have a long conversation that Liam isn’t part of.

Ruby arrived without note, slipping past guards and servants and anyone who might talk to her. She leaves as part of Annabelle’s crew, something cementing them together. It’s as good as a promise to be back—well, it’s as close to a promise that Liam feels like he can ask for, when he asks Annabelle to visit again soon. The captain claps him on the shoulder, promises to watch out for his cousin.

(“I’m good at that,” she tells him. “Looking after cousins.”

He wonders, suddenly, if she counts him among them now.)

“I think they understand each other,” Liam says, the night the  _ Colby II  _ leaves. “I hope...”

“She can be happy,” Primsy murmurs, running a hand through his hair. “I think she’s just forgotten how.

The fire crackles in the fireplace, warming the whole room. The two of them are on the couch, her with a book in one hand and him stretched out, head in her lap. 

Somewhere, the wind is howling. Somewhere, a dragon screams.

In the gardens, supported by stakes, a sapling grows.

**Author's Note:**

> title of this fic comes from “Sophie” by The Altogether; my favorite song of theirs!  
> these two... the most ~Good End~ ending i can imagine for the series at this point is just for the two of them to be happy, idk about the rest all i have for everybody else is angst and i just wanted to put some fluff out there into the universe before we get the finale.  
> hope this was a fun read! leave a comment and let me know what you think! :)


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